It seems like every decade or two Ernest Hemingway's writing undergoes a critical reappraisal. This shouldn't be surprising for, as a stylist, Hemingway is easily one of the most influential writers who has ever lived. However, many of the attitudes displayed in his work have long since come into conflict with our evolving literary culture. Because of this, his writing also makes an excellent sounding board for understanding where current literary and social standards lie. Given that the last round of Hemingway re-evaluations took place in 1999, the 100th anniversary of his birth, I'd say that it's time to once more examine his legacy, especially the aspects that many of us find so troubling.

Though Hemingway has been accused of propagating everything from racism to the most unpleasant kind of machismo, the charges that would seem to carry the most weight revolve around alleged sexism and what many see as his strangely reverential views on war and violence in general.

With respect to the sexism charge, it must be admitted that Hemingway's male characters often have an extremely limited understanding of the deeper aspects of their female counterpoints. In many of his short stories and novels female characters are cast as some combination of vamp, idealised lover, or tragic victim, while only occasionally coming off as "real" human beings. Just consider For Whom the Bell Tolls, his famous Spanish civil war novel, which contains what has to be one of the "ickiest" male-female liaisons in the history of literature. In this work, Robert Jordan, the American protagonist fighting for the Republican side, meets a young woman who has recently been sexually brutalised by Franco's troops. Jordan earnestly proceeds to tell her that the best way to make things right in her life again is for her to take for a lover a "good" man such as him - a point of view with which she soon agrees.

More disturbing are Hemingway's views on war. Even in when I was in my early teens, I found something disquieting about the way he approached this subject; I just couldn't understand how a man who had experienced the front lines of the first world war could have such a romantic view about young men dying in droves and whole societies being torn apart. The battle scenes in his classic war novel A Farewell to Arms, while beautifully rendered, generally have more in common with Homer's idealisations than the truth of the ghastly trenches that nearly destroyed a generation of European men. Even the novel The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway's singular examination of the tragic aftereffects of this conflict, glorifies these events even as it condemns them.

The roots of this romanticism, I would argue, can be found in Hemingway's depiction of violence on a smaller scale, a fact laid most bare in his famed studies of bullfighting. In the non-fiction books Death in the Afternoon and The Dangerous Summer, Hemingway sees the bullfight as grand ballet, in which the matador is cast as both a great artist and a mythic hero. Through this act of ritual violence, great men are born, cowards revealed, and the secrets of life itself are learned. From this perspective, death, being inevitable, is something to be embraced and understood, not feared. War for Hemingway is, in many ways, this same ritual, only played out on a much larger scale, a fact that exposes an ethos that gives Hemingway's work much of its power, while also rendering it unconscionable to a great many of today's readers.

Despite our problems with these and other apects of Ernest Hemingway's world-view, his works remain a rite of passage for many of today's readers and writers. Again, this is because he is such an influential stylist, but also, I believe, because the aspects of his work that give us pause are the ones that challenge us to figure out where we stand on such issues and why. Given this, I don't doubt that 10 or 20 years from now we'll be re-evaluating his work once again. For though Papa may not be the literary idol he once was, he's still a very important writer because of what he tells us about his times, and our times as well.